Posts Tagged ‘E3’

Sword Coast Legends [official site] was one of my favourite experiences at E3. In a little booth off the main show floor, the developers are demo-ing their D&D game’s dungeon master mode. I’ve only recently dipped a toe into D&D with a tabletop campaign but it’s been excellent fun so far and I was curious as to how the mode would measure up.

“Deus Ex meets District 9″ is how the company described Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [official site] during a demo I attended at E3. Set two years after Human Revolution, Mankind Divided showcases a society still deeply fearful after the Aug Incident where mechanically augmented people turned violent, stripped of self-control after a signal deliberately interfered with their in-built bio-chips. The scale of the incident means augmentations are now viewed with suspicion and augmented people treated as outcasts. Adam Jensen himself is working as a counter-terrorist agent fighting some of the resultant crime. Well. That’s his day job. He secretly believes the task force was set up by the Illuminti for a different purpose and is working to take them down.

“He’s a tool and a weapon,” is executive game director Jean-François Dugas’ analysis of this Adam Jensen.

I arrived a few minutes early for a Banner Saga 2 [official site] interview with Stoic’s artist Arnie Jorgensen and writer Drew McGee at E3 so I set my bags down and walked over to a vacant demo computer. The game is the second of Stoic’s planned trilogy and I’ve only played half of the first Banner Saga so I was a little cautious – what if there were spoilers?

Curiosity won out and OH GOD THERE WERE SPOILERS!

With that in mind, if you’ve not played or finished the first game and wish to avoid spoilers just bookmark this for later:

Whilst at E3 I spent an hour with Sean Murray, managing director over at Hello Games. We were talking about No Man’s Sky [official site]. Well, we were mostly talking about No Man’s Sky. I had to cut a surprisingly lengthy discussion of whether cake was better than pie (it isn’t). The thing about No Man’s Sky which is most interesting to me right now is how Hello Games – Murray in particular – are trying to deal with audience expectations, shifting them from hype and projected desire to excited realism.

The Hitman [official site] trailer shown at E3 gave a promising tease for a game which is provoking anxiety as well as anticipation. The sentiment I’ve heard echoing through editorials and comment sections boils down to “more Blood Money, less Absolution, please” but IO Interactive’s creative director, Christian Elverdam hopes to marry the best of both games, distilling them to find the essence of Hitman. Eau d’Assassin, perhaps?

“We’re trying to distil the essence of [Hitman],” Elverdam tells me. “We’ve been doing Hitman for fifteen years and we felt we had a chance now to try to build… I wouldn’t say the perfect hitman game, but the aspiration is to build the perfect Hitman game.”

We’re sitting in a little room at the back of the Square Enix booth a little removed from the scrum of the E3 show floor. Elverdam is about to take Agent 47 to a Parisian fashion show in an enormous mansion – possibly an art gallery. It’s at this swanky gathering that you’ll attempt to find a way to take out a gentleman by the name of Viktor Novikov.

Remake or reboot? That’s the question I asked Jacob Beucler, director of global operations at Wargaming during an E3 demonstration of Master of Orion [official site].

“Definitely a reboot,” he says. “We’re taking things very seriously in terms of what made this franchise great.” By this he means Master of Orion and its first sequel, not the curious but problematic Master of Orion 3 (which our Adam likes to pretend never even happened).

When I go to watch the Creative Assembly team show off units from their upcoming Total War: Warhammer [official site] game, what really sticks out to me is the sense of humour. I’ve been to Total War previews before and the emphasis is very definitely on serious historical epic battles. This time around I watch a goblin with scrappy-looking wooden wings clamber into a catapult, preparing to fling himself into the ranks of the opposition.

“That’s called the Doomdiver catapult,” grins battle designer Simon Mann. “Goblins volunteer – I don’t know why you would – to have a pair of wooden wings strapped to their backs, get loaded into a catapult and then just get launched. In our game it is kind of silly, and there’s a lot of humour in the Warhammer franchise.”

The demo we’ve just seen didn’t involve a hands-on but it did give a decent peek at a lot of the units from the Empire and Greenskins factions. (Dwarfs and Vampire Counts will come a bit later, with Chaos also very strongly implied in trailers.) The Greenbacks are all manner of weird and wonderful, while the Empire occupies relatively familiar Total War territory – give or take the odd demigryph.

R2-D2 smells like yoghurt. In fact, the whole second part of the Star Wars Battlefront [official site] queue at E3 smells like yoghurt. I’m in a group of 40 attendees waiting for our turn to do battle on Hoth in the final play session of E3. I think the yoghurty smell is coming from the copious dry ice, which is swirling around R2’s wheels as EA try to create a Hoth-like experience in a cavernous conference hall in downtown LA.

The Hoth of the game is not yoghurty, but it is gorgeous. An expansive snowy wilderness which we spawn into as Stormtroopers. Well, 20 of us do. The other 20 are rebel scum, ripe for the shooting.Read the rest of this entry »

E3 is in full swing. The announcements and press conferences are done, and attendees are getting down to the business of playing games, chugging energy drinks and wondering when it will all be over (TODAY, IT WILL ALL BE OVER TODAY). Pip is on-site but the rest of RPS stayed home, watching from afar. We’ve covered the showcase events, gathered all of the news and shouted CUPHEAD until our lungs burn.

Below, you’ll find details of every major PC game at the event, including those that were revealed for the first time. All of the trailers and videos are in one place, along with our thoughts about what we’ve seen.

Just Cause 3 [official site] is a spectator’s dream. I’d been playing for at least two and a half hours when I decided to take a walk around the room to see what all of the other journalists were up to. Some were testing the physics by attaching cars to boats, planes to people and spluttering scooters to everything. Some had learned to navigate the game’s new yet familiar setting – the fictional Mediterranean island of Medici – like ground-skimming superheroes, swift creatures of the air who used a combination of grapple lines, wingsuit and parachute to stay airborne. Some were exploding everything.

On one screen the Looney Tunes violence elsewhere had been transformed into something grim.

Doom [official site] came to the Dolby Theatre as E3 began. Bethesda’s showcase event included an in-depth look at a game we already knew about, the announcement of a game that we already knew about and the blood-spattered reveal of a game we’ve been playing (in various forms) for most of our adult lives. Doom is back. Nathan Ditum was on-site for the live demonstration, and squinted through the gore and melee animations to find the rhythm of the past.

It’s a strange and difficult thing, to bring back a classic game. During the in-game demonstration of id’s new Doom at Bethesda’s E3 showcase, crowd reaction suggests that this particular reboot is on the right track. There are cheers when our hero punches a demon’s head clean off with an outrageous melee attack. There is a round of appreciative applause when an arm is wrenched off at the elbow and the palm used as a key (clever!). And there are delighted gasps as a demon is torn in the manner of a strongman phonebook trick, a wet fleshy tear from the jaw down.

A viking, a samurai and a knight walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Is this some kind of videogame?” and the knight replies, “Yes. Yes it is.”

For Honor was announced at the Ubisoft E3 event last night. Under development at Ubisoft Montreal, where 90% of the world’s games will soon be created, it’s a violent blend of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, War of the Vikings and daft-as-a-motorised-frog TV show Deadliest Warrior*. As a viking, samurai or knight, you’ll run around battlefields attempting to gain control of key areas, fighting human opponents as well as hacking your way through AI warriors. Two videos await below – a glossy made-for-E3 trailer and some multiplayer footage with dev commentary.